FAITHFULNESS OF FORAMINIFERA TO DEPOSITIONAL ENVIRONMENTS: A META-ANALYSIS OF STUDIES IN THE SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATES

Researchers have developed many foraminiferal assemblages to answer questions in micropaleontology, climate sciences and oceanography. While individual studies note correlations between species and environmental settings, an analysis including numerous assemblages is required to understand the full extent of a species’ prevalence in each depositional setting. This is especially important in depositional environment reconstructions as foraminifera can be an important tool for interpreting past environments. An in-depth analysis of numerous published assemblages from the southeastern United States was performed to determine species faithfulness to their environments through comparing species prevalence and depositional settings across studies. Our analysis will provide insight into the consistency of species inhabitation of various environmental settings while also developing a system of comparable biofacies definitions between studies. To complete this analysis, we have compiled a matrix of more than 350 samples from foraminiferal assemblages from more than ten published works focused on surficial samples and core material from across the southeastern United States. The percentage of each species within the total assemblage was calculated, and any species which represented less than two percent of the total assemblage was removed from the analysis. The dendrogram from a preliminary cluster analysis has yielded ten sample clusters (Euclidean distance = 5). The samples within each of these clusters are relatively heterogenous across samples, suggesting that the cluster analysis is able to resolve biofacies and/or depositional environments (rather than simply clustering samples from the same study together). We will continue to assign depositional environments using information from the original sources for each cluster of samples and calculate occurrence, constancy, and biofacies fidelity for each of the resulting clusters. This work should shed light on the consistency of depositional environment assignments in the literature that are based (at least partially) on foraminiferal assemblages.